New video-game movie Noobz hits theaters this weekend, so make sure you’re absolutely anywhere else. Pry open a manhole and spend the day pretending to be a plumber in the sewers if you have to: it will be more fun and have more in common with video gaming. We’re always excited to see new independent filmmaking, but this looks more painful than sitting on a joystick. more »
Call of Duty is one of the most profitable gaming franchises ever created. The ninth in the series, Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, grossed more than half a billion dollars in its first 24 hours of sales. That’s enough to buy three actual F-22A Raptor stealth fighter jets. When a video game can afford to purchase air superiority over most countries — and have enough to hire Robert Downey Jr.as a pilot — that’s the sort of thing Hollywood notices. more »
Game developer Crytek has hired directorAlbert Hughes to bring its Crysis gaming franchise to the big screen. Half of the Hughes brothers team behind Menace II Society and The Book of Eli, Albert is directing The 7 Wonders Of Crysis 3, an online series set in a reforested future New York 2047. more »
We've come to expect high-concept portrayals of the human condition from the Sundance Film Festival, but next year, virtual humans will get some art-house love, too. I'm talking about G.J. Echternkamp’s feature-film debut, Virtually Heroes, which will get a Park City at Midnight premiere at the festival in January. more »
James Rolfe is the Angry Video Game Nerd, a man who knows how to define a niche. His eponymous online videos have featured on YouTube, ScrewAttack, GameTrailers, Opie & Anthony and Cinemassacre, and for eight years anyone who ever wanted to watch a man get extremely angry while screaming about old video games knew exactly where to go. more »
CBS Films' announcement that it had hired Sinister director Scott Derrickson to direct a feature adaptation of the Deus Ex: Human Revolution video game is exciting news. Human Revolution was one of the greatest games of 2011. It's a supreme science-fiction thriller and ideal movie fodder that features a highly adaptable cybernetically augmented protagonist named Adam Jensen who may be the ultimate action hero. But this is much more than a movie announcement. It could be the dawn of a new age in video-game movies. more »
Wreck-It Ralph has broken the gaming movie curse. Its $49-million opening weekend marked the biggest debut for a Walt Disney Animation Studios picture, and as Movieline's Brian Brooks' reported, a $200-million gross is not out of the question. Not surprisingly, people are already asking director, Rich Moore, about a sequel; and to that, I can say, I'd buy a ticket to that. more »
Samuel Hadida is taking on the Wolfenstein video-game franchise. Considering that his Resident Evil movies made more than $500 million, that’s big news. If you didn’t spend the early '90s introducing Nazis to bullets, Wolfenstein 3D is the grandaddy of all great first person shooters. It came out a year before the similarly influential Doom was released by the same company (id Software). The parallels will hopefully end there. With Oscar-winning Pulp Fiction co-screenwriter Roger Avary slated to write and direct the Wolfenstein movie, it should be a helluva lot more watchable than the 2005 Doom adaptation that starred Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson (and almost spelled doom for his acting career) . more »
Now that the scariest parts of Silent Hill: Revelation 3D are proving to be the grisly reviews and box-office results, it' s a good time to look at a handful of choice video games that have much greater potential than the Konami franchise to be blockbuster horror movies. In at least two of the examples I cite below, along with the pros and cons of adapting them, the film industry apparently agrees — or did at one point — that the game titles would translate well to the big screen. Actually making the movies adaptations of the games has not worked so well. more »
LEGO has released the trailer for LEGO Batman: The Movie — DC Super Heroes Unite, the feature-length version of the video game sequel that will be released in 2013 on Blu-Ray, DVD and via digital download, that's based on the toy building-block adaptation of the comic. That's four levels of franchising away from the source material, which means we're more than halfway to Kevin Bacon. But despite sounding like the Inception of marketing, the movie looks great. Here are six reasons why: more »
Microsoft and 343 industries aren’t getting into the cinema, they’re sidestepping it entirely as an obsolete technology. Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn is a 90-minute, $10 million dollar movie, and if you’re wondering why you haven’t heard about its upcoming release, it’s because it’s already out. The new movie follows the a squad of military cadets as they gradually learn how to be soldiers and then, very suddenly, learn that they’re under alien attack. Finally, they learn that Master Chief kicks ass. But gamers already knew that. more »
We finally have a real Resident Evil movie! It only took seven tries! (That might not sound good, but by video game movie standards it’s sensational.) The five live-action Milla Jovovich movies were fantastic, but about the only thing they shared with the games was a title. The directors of those features focused on making great action movies for the mass market they knew didn't really care about the games. The CG-animated Resident Evil: Damnation is a great Resident Evil movie because it doesn’t care about the mass market; it’s so focused on the games and the gaming audience that it was released on the Xbox and PS3 dashboards a week before the DVD went on sale. more »
The Game’s Bond. James Bond. Which means that you will be Bored. Majorly Bored. Agent 007 should be perfect video game character. “Kicking ass with the latest fun gadgets” is his actual job description. So it’s a shame that almost every Bond game sucks. Not even Blofeld got to betray Bond this many times and come back to do it again. more »
Everyone is either looking forward to Wreck-It Ralph or still refers to video games as “those beeping boximacallits.” There are no other options. Gaming movies have a bad reputation, which is weird, because, despite what you may have heard and read, they have yet to materialize. We’ve seen dozens of action movies that share the titles of video games and little else, and run from reprehensible to ridiculously profitable — sometimes in the same series. We've also watched feature-length advertisements for video games that we've paid to see in hopes that there might be a movie in there somewhere. Case in point: Universal Pictures’ The Wizard. But that may be about to change. Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph could be the first true gaming movie — the first of a genre that could some day stand alongside war, horror and gangster movie genres. more »
My CODEC has been ringing off the hook since my Metal Gear Solid movie post on Monday. It seems that the Internet agrees with Hideo Kojima: they love huge walking nuclear battle tanks and extended discussions of everything around them. Given that many of those discussions took place in the comments section of my post and because talking about cool things with smart people is more than just a job to me, I've decided to respond to a couple of select points that were made. more »
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